Recent posts by pzweig on Kongregate

This is the typical monitization scheme for these temporary flash games. Offer a bunch of poorly explained temporary bonuses for a high price and add game mechanics that are progressively more time consuming. This gives the players an impression that they can skip over the bad portions of the game by paying, but since the entire game is just more of the same, all that paying gets you is to an even less rewarding/more waiting part of the game. The idea is that some players will just pay thousands of dollars and company could make some serious cash.

Flash games that are likely permanent will allow players to unlock the game at a price similar to a retail game ($5-$20) such as AdventureQuest and then may have some things you can buy to save time but that you can get in the game anyway without paying again. Since most players can see the obvious value in permanently unlocking all the premium content in a game and since this matches up well with the way players usually buy games, many more players will buy into the game and it will be around for 10+ years unlike these fly-by-night games on Kongregate (Backyard Monsters, Utopia Kingdoms, Dawn of the Dragons, etc.) which are lucky to last a year or two.

Money isn’t the only reason that players get upset about inefficient monitization schemes. Most players who have played a “free” game with such a system have lost their time investment when the game when under. It is also very sad to think that the programmers will lose their jobs because of a corporate moron who doesn’t understand gamers at all and would rather gamble on catching whales. It is even worse to see that most old games that didn’t make any money were able to outlive these “premium” games which always implement a 3rd party server which they shut down when the game dies. A game like this one could easily have a stand-alone single player mode since the interaction between players is negligible anyway and then the game would survive after it gets abandoned by the developer. Imagine how sad it would be if all video games would just die and be completely gone from the world after 1-4 years. All of the classics would have been gone when players stopped paying for continues. Therefore, it makes sense that players will negatively regard such practices that attempt to exploit the players, weaken the video game industry overall, and reduce the profits of company producing the game. I can not think of a positive of such a system except that a mediocre company that doesn’t understand the players can make some money as opposed to no money by just making the game for free. Most players who would buy these types of bonuses come away from the experience feeling ripped-off and become more weary of putting any money into premium games. Also, this game will shut down eventually and the players who paid will feel like they got cheated and the players who didn’t pay will be left wonder how good the game could have been with just a little common sense.

Maybe the shop could work more like a shop on every RPG where the “customers” usually sell the shop more stuff than they buy. It seems that you are very limited on crafting ingredients, but that you can pause the game in a menu and the ingredients regenerate, but what is the point? Are we supposed to select a few things to build and then pause and then walk away and come back to play later? Also, why would I want more customers to come each day? All that it does is makes it so that you don’t have what they want and they get upset, which is about the dumbest idea ever. If the store doesn’t sell what you want, then you go somewhere else and you don’t expect a store to produce everything they sell right in the store either. Maybe it would help to either let the player limit how many customers come to the store in a day or refuse to sell low-value items without a negative affect. Also, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be able to ban dumb npcs from the store that want their 37th iron bracer. The only way it would make sense for the customers to keep buying duplicates of low value items over and over is if they are supposed to be reselling them at a decent price…

NOTE TO DEVELOPERS: Try playing this game and see if you can stand it for very long. That medium badge should be hard simply because of the time required and the repetition. This is more tedious than grinding levels on Dragon Warrior 1 on the NES.

This is the same game as DOTD just reskinned but you monetized it the same way. There is no point to try to double dip. You should at least test another monetization scheme to see which is more profitable. The graphics are cool, but there is just no point since the futuristic setting has no appeal and the contrived ship/commander/troop thing is just to match the DOTD setup for no reason except for more stuff to sell. Maybe just devote these resources to DOTD since it is monetized the same and has more players. You could have at least tried to determine the profitability of a premium store without gambling since there is no way this game would win over your DOTD customers anyway and this game could have been a good one for new players who are put off by the constant bragging about premium items that can not be purchased on DOTD simply because certain players had found the game 2 years earlier. You are going to have to keep making new skins of the same game at this rate because no one wants to play on a permanently distorted playing field.

I already referred to the TOS which are linked directly from the game. If you read them, you will see that 5PG is under no obligation to continue the game or provide any service whatsoever. They can even delete or modify to the point of being useless the items that you paid for if they decide to.

Doesn’t Kongregate pay the producers of the game for the kreds used in the game? It seems like they would have a hard time refunding anything unless the owners agreed to give something back since Kongregate could lose money if the same kreds are spent multiple times. I noticed something today when I logged on. I did my normal clicking stuff and when I thought about it, I wasn’t having fun anymore. I got all the quests done and have gotten most things from the raids and I just don’t feel like clicking anymore. I have 400 PC left, so I guess I can keep checking in. I was having fun with this game for like 2 months playing everyday so I don’t know why I feel like just playing some of my other games instead.

That’s interesting. So maybe the best way to play these types of games is to go to the most popular platform. I didn’t like how DoTD worked on Facebook and I dumped it right away. Also, it looks like LoH is dying on every platform, so 5PG may work different than the other games.

I remember that on Backyard Defenders, people spent WAY too much kreds on the game. WHAT did you get in return? just 10 kreds. The game was too awesome, sadly they had to put it down. But it still is on Facebook, it’s just that i don’t want to restart everything again. just too boring and long.

Thanks. You have some good points. It is clearly in there TOC that they can end the game at any time and have no obligation to support the game in any way or do anything at all on their end except to collect money. Thankfully, they have went above and beyond those terms and continued to support the game. Since players can’t see how much money 5PG makes or loses on the game, it is impossible to tell how close the end is.

Skurd6 is obviously a troll and an idiot. It’s best to avoid people of his intelligence level, or lack there of. As far as this game shutting down. You should be concerned when spending money on this game, or any other online game. The developers owe you nothing in return should they decide to shut the game down tomorrow, or 10 years from now. It doesn’t matter if it’s a free browser based game, or P2P MMORPG. Many games on Kongregate and otherwise have shut down after selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of content. Utopia Kingdoms, LoH, Dragons Call, Backyard Monsters, etc. Just to name a few. When they shut down, they returned not one cent to customers. It doesn’t matter if they spent $10, Or $10,000.

No, you cannot sue them. And no, they don’t owe you anything in return. The End.

Those are some good points. I guess I was thinking about games more like the single player games that work forever. I have Final Fantasy 1 on the NES and some Atari games that still work just fine if I wanted to play them. All of my old PC games kept working as Windows changed and most old console games can even be played on emulators. There is nothing like that for a social game. Perhaps these games are the worst long term investment that you can make in gaming. I actually was thinking this game would still be going strong in 20 years because it’s core elements are timeless and the graphics don’t matter. The older players may die off in real life though and it would be pretty hard to expect a new player to start when other players have 32 +100% legions and full 35/240 legions filled with all premiums. The number will get out of hand as the newer gear is generally better than older gear to make it desirable as new content is added. Dropping other games is a pretty clear sign that this one will end eventually too considering the in game signs such as drop rates less than 0.05% on recent additions. This clearly means that they expect it to take longer to get things so they can make less stuff to get and wind down their development costs. Also, the new item packs are hastily thrown together cash-grabs that were clearly not well thought out and were produced with the most minimal effort. Perhaps 20 years is just too long for a game like this.

Here are some examples of what I think of when when I think of things that will be around indefinitely: the pyramids, the great wall of china, niagara falls, bad traffic in atlanta, taxes.

Here is an example of what I do not think of: flash games I play on kongregate.

If anyone is going into this thinking it is going to be around “indefinitely” or that it “is never going to die”, and spending accordingly, you’ve made a poor decision. Do any of you honestly think 20 years from now this will still be kicking along and we’ll be in chat complaining about how hard it is to make SoCK XXVI?

This is that kind of reply that I expected. I can see no reason that I would want play any type of game with someone with your ideas. I don’t even think that 5PG would agree with your statements. I’m sure they have a goal to deliver some entertainment value to everyone and to increase that entertainment for those who invest in the game. My main concern was that the game would fail because of inefficient programming and/or an inappropriate revenue scheme that drives out paying customers and/or prevents new customers.

Congratulations on being so successful in life. I hope you continue to prosper and pour lots of money into the game to keep it healthy. Perhaps I falsely assumed that free games are meant to draw in players who may not have much disposable income. But the games would offer something to a few of the players to pay alot or many players to pay something so that the game makes a profit.

You could be right that I should just quite because I pay what I can and it isn’t alot of money to big shots like you, but I could still play for free and seeing your post makes me want to just keep pushing the reload button over and over to waste even more resources since you can foot the bill for me right, big man?

It’s called a handicap. You deserve to have a handicap since you started later. Even if you played as many hours or used as much energy/stamina/honor as another player and spent more kreds, you should not be as good since they started first and got the items that you can’t have since you are handicapped (retarded) for starting the game late. You should have known 3 years ago that this was the game to invest in and it’s your fault for not playing and buying those items when you had the chance. You need to keep playing because if you quit then you will be even more handicapped. It isn’t like you didn’t have forever to find out that this game is good. Why didn’t you just buy the items when they were up for sale? Also, you never need to gamble. Every two weeks, you can just buy the 49 new items in the pack to get the 2 good new items plus the 4 items that you chose and get them all. It only costs like 1300-1500 pc to stay on top of things. It’s not 5PG’s fault that you were raised in a trailer court or that you don’t have a good job with $400 of disposable income to spend on a free game. This game clearly appeals to the wealthy if you read the story. Your character is a nobleman who wins the battles because he is better than everyone else and he enslaves his minions (generals and troops) to do his bidding. Even some of the crafting has you mass murder your troops to get an item, so if you don’t like that, just play something else. Just because the game can be played for free doesn’t mean it was intended for poor people. And yes, the game uses bandwidth. That is why we will all be better off if you just quit and play your cheap Steam games that you seem to be so happy about. See how long you can stand to play those games before you come running back and begging for a chance to buy those items that you missed.

You know what, 5PG would make more money if they did sell those older items to everyone, but players could just look up what each item does and buy what they want and then players wont be as unique. We don’t want everyone buying everything and making no no special anymore. 5PG doesn’t sell these items and loses this profit because they have agreed to keep these items off the market to protect us players that have bought the stuff that we wanted and we don’t you to have. It is a service that 5PG provides to everyone who already has an item to prevent others from having it too.

Also, you are completely wrong about new players not coming along. Even with the handicap, they will get stronger than you after you quit and when the old players are all gone, the players who are still around will continue to buy every item every week and make 5PG lots of money, so the game isn’t going to die. Look at all the new content. They can make this content as easy as getting an image and writing a sentence and then entering a few stats. They are super efficient at adding content and they focus on that instead of saving bandwidth. Bandwidth is super cheap for big companies and the game never slows down as is, so why should they try to save some bandwidth. I think you just don’t understand macrotransaction games and you probably should just stick to the single player games. The last thing we need is a bunch more whiners and a bunch of noobs filling our slots in raids and not doing good damage. Please just quit and save us all the trouble.

I noticed that LoH is closing and you have an event to give some stuff to former players. I am greatly concerned that 5PG is closing a game that they sold premium content on. I skimmed the ToS for DOTD and noticed that 5PG has no obligation whatsoever to continue the game or compensate players if the game shuts down. Normally, I would never even consider that a Kongregate game woudl shut down because these games usually cost next to nothing to maintain. There were 2 games that I had premium content on before on Kongregate that shut down, Backyard Monster and Utopia Kingdoms. Both of these games would have been expensive to maintain because of gameplay mechanics. They both had maps where players were located that affected the gameplay, which never scales well. Backyard monsters also had player created maps for each player and every cell could take damage that would recover on a timer, so you could have thousands of timers going per player, which is a load on the server. Utopia Kingdoms allowed you to send unlimited attacks that all had their own timers going (I had over 10,000 attacks going at once before.) These games had too much overhead because of these inefficiencies and this gives me great concern for DOTD. DOTD also can only stay open by taking in a large amount of excess money to cover its inefficient coding. Although this game’s logic is very simple and an Apple IIe could do all the calculations for 1,000,000+ players if the coding was efficient, this game is very inefficient with bandwidth. The game does not use any buffer and instead decides to redownload everything ever time you play. It foolishly disconnects the player for inactivity even though this is a waiting type game and then redownloads the entire game again when the player refreshes. Right now there are enough “whales” ( “players paying over $100 per month”: http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/14/whales-and-why-social-gamers-are-just-gamers ) to support this inefficient coding. My concern is that even though there are pretty many players for a Kongregate game, there still are not really that many players based on looking at the chat rooms and the inefficient code reduces the profit made by 5PG. This is why they consider $15 items to be a great deal and $4 for a 1% chance at a $15 item to be a good deal. They need this income to keep the game going. Like all businesses, if there is a single quarter that they are negative on profit, they will close the game down. I have spent at least 1500 kreds on this game. I do surveys every day until I get a success and I did some offers that seemed like good deals and I used my gamestop cards all to get PC. I need some kind of assurance that DOTD will be maintained indefinitely. If the coding is logical and efficient, then the overhead should be tiny. You need a good artist, a good programmer, and a good writer. It also helps to have a person or too for admin and for getting feedback, but the game could continue and grow with just the first 3. The overhead for bandwidth needs to decrease too. Look into how other games have cached their content to avoid meaningless redownloading. I t would not be surprising if some players are using over 1GB per month just redownloading the game over and over and this raises the price for goods or decreases the profit. Another related issue is that DOTD implies that it will exist forever and that most of the items are available for purchase for a limited time and then will never be available again or will be prohibitively expensive. This wouldn’t matter if the there were other items that could fill in for those items, but I see a trend in the few months that I have played towards items that give an illogical boast based on some random items that you own. It makes sense to reward players that have played for a long time, but it sure feels like adding insult to injury to me for new players. Not only have the players who happened to be lucky enough to find this game when it started been rewarded with all the bonus stats, items, and opportunities for permanent boosted during the time that they played, they also are getting compounded benefits that no new player will ever be able to compete with. It isn’t a problem to make them stronger, but the opportunities are now gone leaving newer players as second class citizens in DOTD who are expected to both purchase the new premiums and gamble (which is considered immoral by many) at terrible odds to pick up the most valuable missed items. Some items like Tussao both give enormous immediate benefit and continue to increase the strength of players that own them over time compared to other players. Other items have a legion boost like Fontella, which will never be obsolete no matter how long you play and provide an insurmountable PVP bonus. Since $15 is no longer considered enough money to pay for items that are useful unless it is the first week they are out, it must be reasoned that the community values items that they purchased more so because others can’t get them. If this is the case and this idea is intentionally supported by 5PG, then we have a community that does not value mutual success. It must be one of those games where older players go around calling everyone else a noob because they don’t have something they can’t get even though skill was not a factor in making a purchase. It could give players a thrill to brag about doing extremely high damage that will be impossible for others to reach even if they continue to pay and play, but how do these behaviors attract or keep new customers? If everyone who starts now is permanently a second or third class citizen, then you must focus to keep your core players because the game will die when they leave. This guarantees that the DOTD will in fact have to close down eventually if it holds to these ideas as revenue drops. I still have enjoyed playing this game, but it is difficult to justify spending kreds when other 5PG games close and customers have wasted kreds in those games. I would like to think that players get some value from the time that they have an item after its purchase, so that older items would have been worth purchasing in the past because players got to use those items for 2 years and it improved their gameplay experience, but this is just too much at odds with the policies of not repeating set price sales and listing new items in chests that cheat players out of their PC. If the items were truly useful over a long period of time, then older players would not be threatened if those items were sold again. If every item in chests and expeditions were valuable, they wouldn’t need to be sold in such a way. It is also difficult for me to continue to pay 5PG when 5PG is betting against me. 5PG designed the gambling to give duplicates on purpose and to keep me from getting the items that I want to purchase, thereby reducing the value of the PC which is already expensive. Usually, when I pay someone, I expect something for it. I wouldn’t give a good tip a restaurant if the waitress didn’t refill my drink and brought me poor quality food and then demanded that I pay again to get some other food that I may or may not like. I wouldn’t never return to such a restaurant that is so hostile to its customers. Maybe someday players and 5PG can be on the same team. In the mean time, I am expecting hate replies from the community which means that I shouldn’t even be playing this game because my views are just too far from the base. I also know that even though this is the most I have put into a flash game and that the kreds I used on DOTD had more value than the money I spent on Steam bundles which netted me over 200 full quality games, that my spending is too low for my opinion to matter and it is better to ignore me and lose my $20-$50 per month since others will spend $1000s. Perhaps this game is just too rich for my blood since I always have to work for my money.

Does everyone have the same goal? If you simply want to get better at any part of the game, you just log on and play since every action you can take benefits your character in some way. Then what is the point of getting the premiums? You will get better regardless of if you buy any of them. I had a particular goal to increase legion strength as much as I can, but when I saw that there were premiums like Fontella and found out that some players actually got to just get her for 100 PC and then 5PG put her in the gambling system with an expected price of 2000 PC, it was pretty much them waving it in my face that I will never be able to maximize my legion and I can’t improve it simply by playing except when there is an event that offers a troop, legion, or general that is better than what I am using. I would never expect to be able to catch up with the players who have been playing for 2 years if they continue to play, but I would expect to be able to either get items that fit my goal that have already been released or I would at least expect to never see these items waved in front of my face on the advertisement screen. At least I didn’t see them flaunting Tussao, but I still hear about him from the community and about the excellent bi-corn mount that he gives for free. When I see these thinks, it says that no matter how long I play, my legion is 100% power under what it is supposed to be and my procs are much weaker than they should be.

Oh course your post posses a solution to just change my goal. I could simply focus all my effort on questing, but I finished all the quests already. I could just repeat them over and over, just to see how many I can do in a level and that number would increase as I level. The problem is that this is not my goal. I have a goal and I basically am supposed to give up on that goal even though it is a legitimate goal that a player might have after seeing some of how the game works. I would be very happy if I could buy the 100pc premium every month and have a random 100 pc premium that I don’t own already replace the one that I bought so that I could collect them all over time. I will not be able to afford more than 2 per month anyway.

I was impressed by the retro-raids that I have seen. These give me hope that newer players can experience older content and they just added something extra for older players. Also, the stat gains fully justify hitting the old WRs again anyway if you can do the massive damage that the high level players can do. Even if you can’t, you can decide on a point that gives you a good bonus. I have really enjoyed all the WR/ERs that I have seen so far and I could just stop buying the premiums and just check in to see if there is an event. I would much rather spend PC to get stuff that helps my legion work better than buying potions. I bought a few before I know about the premiums and they do have a fair price.

It is good that everyone enjoys the game for their own reasons to keep lots of people playing. This is bad, however, for the profitability of the game since you won’t need to buy anything to improve either raid damage or questing potential by simply farming sp and increasing stamina or energy and other stats. We do need to keep using kreds to keep the game up though.

The main point of my original post was that I spend what I consider to be a large amount of kreds which took me a great deal of time to get and other have spent way more than I have, but the game could close at any time. The long term profit of the game will not help it either, so no company uses past profits to maintain a future loss, so the game needs to make some profit every month. Anyone who is eligible for surveys could do them and put 200 kreds into the game per month for free, but there needs to be a point. If every new player including any player who started 3 months after the game began is a second or third class citizen regardless of if they invest every month, then it doesn’t make sense to keep buying the premiums. I could just play for free, but then I would be shortening the life of the game and this game has alot of good things going for it. I don’t want it to end, but 5PG is not taking basic steps to keep their bottom line under control which means the game will fail in time. There are games from several years ago on Kongregate that never made money and still stayed on the site, so I hope that 5PG will optimize their code, reduce their bottom line expenses, and keep this game going. It is unacceptable to close these games and closing one them is a bad sign. A token reward in another game that a player may or may not like hardly makes up for potential $1000s that players may have invested.

OP is completely missing the point of this game. If your goal is to be the best player of all time in DotD, you should leave now….you’ll never catch up to awesome guys like Sui, RigerZ, Sienna and Goontra. (lol…;-).

DotD is about getting a bit better everyday in what you like most (questing , raiding, PvP, running a guild, reaching FS on N’rl with 1 stam…etc…)

Most important thing is to get better at having fun! Being disgruntled about all the premiums you’ve missed isn’t going to help.

As long as 5th keeps it up with the weekly updates, I don’t see this game dying anytime soon ( great job btw 5th!)

I noticed that LoH is closing and you have an event to give some stuff to former players. I am greatly concerned that 5PG is closing a game that they sold premium content on. I skimmed the ToS for DOTD and noticed that 5PG has no obligation whatsoever to continue the game or compensate players if the game shuts down. Normally, I would never even consider that a Kongregate game woudl shut down because these games usually cost next to nothing to maintain. There were 2 games that I had premium content on before on Kongregate that shut down, Backyard Monster and Utopia Kingdoms. Both of these games would have been expensive to maintain because of gameplay mechanics. They both had maps where players were located that affected the gameplay, which never scales well. Backyard monsters also had player created maps for each player and every cell could take damage that would recover on a timer, so you could have thousands of timers going per player, which is a load on the server. Utopia Kingdoms allowed you to send unlimited attacks that all had their own timers going (I had over 10,000 attacks going at once before.) These games had too much overhead because of these inefficiencies and this gives me great concern for DOTD. DOTD also can only stay open by taking in a large amount of excess money to cover its inefficient coding. Although this game’s logic is very simple and an Apple IIe could do all the calculations for 1,000,000+ players if the coding was efficient, this game is very inefficient with bandwidth. The game does not use any buffer and instead decides to redownload everything ever time you play. It foolishly disconnects the player for inactivity even though this is a waiting type game and then redownloads the entire game again when the player refreshes. Right now there are enough “whales” ( “players paying over $100 per month”: http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/14/whales-and-why-social-gamers-are-just-gamers ) to support this inefficient coding. My concern is that even though there are pretty many players for a Kongregate game, there still are not really that many players based on looking at the chat rooms and the inefficient code reduces the profit made by 5PG. This is why they consider $15 items to be a great deal and $4 for a 1% chance at a $15 item to be a good deal. They need this income to keep the game going. Like all businesses, if there is a single quarter that they are negative on profit, they will close the game down. I have spent at least 1500 kreds on this game. I do surveys every day until I get a success and I did some offers that seemed like good deals and I used my gamestop cards all to get PC. I need some kind of assurance that DOTD will be maintained indefinitely. If the coding is logical and efficient, then the overhead should be tiny. You need a good artist, a good programmer, and a good writer. It also helps to have a person or too for admin and for getting feedback, but the game could continue and grow with just the first 3. The overhead for bandwidth needs to decrease too. Look into how other games have cached their content to avoid meaningless redownloading. I t would not be surprising if some players are using over 1GB per month just redownloading the game over and over and this raises the price for goods or decreases the profit. Another related issue is that DOTD implies that it will exist forever and that most of the items are available for purchase for a limited time and then will never be available again or will be prohibitively expensive. This wouldn’t matter if the there were other items that could fill in for those items, but I see a trend in the few months that I have played towards items that give an illogical boast based on some random items that you own. It makes sense to reward players that have played for a long time, but it sure feels like adding insult to injury to me for new players. Not only have the players who happened to be lucky enough to find this game when it started been rewarded with all the bonus stats, items, and opportunities for permanent boosted during the time that they played, they also are getting compounded benefits that no new player will ever be able to compete with. It isn’t a problem to make them stronger, but the opportunities are now gone leaving newer players as second class citizens in DOTD who are expected to both purchase the new premiums and gamble (which is considered immoral by many) at terrible odds to pick up the most valuable missed items. Some items like Tussao both give enormous immediate benefit and continue to increase the strength of players that own them over time compared to other players. Other items have a legion boost like Fontella, which will never be obsolete no matter how long you play and provide an insurmountable PVP bonus. Since $15 is no longer considered enough money to pay for items that are useful unless it is the first week they are out, it must be reasoned that the community values items that they purchased more so because others can’t get them. If this is the case and this idea is intentionally supported by 5PG, then we have a community that does not value mutual success. It must be one of those games where older players go around calling everyone else a noob because they don’t have something they can’t get even though skill was not a factor in making a purchase. It could give players a thrill to brag about doing extremely high damage that will be impossible for others to reach even if they continue to pay and play, but how do these behaviors attract or keep new customers? If everyone who starts now is permanently a second or third class citizen, then you must focus to keep your core players because the game will die when they leave. This guarantees that the DOTD will in fact have to close down eventually if it holds to these ideas as revenue drops. I still have enjoyed playing this game, but it is difficult to justify spending kreds when other 5PG games close and customers have wasted kreds in those games. I would like to think that players get some value from the time that they have an item after its purchase, so that older items would have been worth purchasing in the past because players got to use those items for 2 years and it improved their gameplay experience, but this is just too much at odds with the policies of not repeating set price sales and listing new items in chests that cheat players out of their PC. If the items were truly useful over a long period of time, then older players would not be threatened if those items were sold again. If every item in chests and expeditions were valuable, they wouldn’t need to be sold in such a way. It is also difficult for me to continue to pay 5PG when 5PG is betting against me. 5PG designed the gambling to give duplicates on purpose and to keep me from getting the items that I want to purchase, thereby reducing the value of the PC which is already expensive. Usually, when I pay someone, I expect something for it. I wouldn’t give a good tip a restaurant if the waitress didn’t refill my drink and brought me poor quality food and then demanded that I pay again to get some other food that I may or may not like. I wouldn’t never return to such a restaurant that is so hostile to its customers. Maybe someday players and 5PG can be on the same team. In the mean time, I am expecting hate replies from the community which means that I shouldn’t even be playing this game because my views are just too far from the base. I also know that even though this is the most I have put into a flash game and that the kreds I used on DOTD had more value than the money I spent on Steam bundles which netted me over 200 full quality games, that my spending is too low for my opinion to matter and it is better to ignore me and lose my $20-$50 per month since others will spend $1000s. Perhaps this game is just too rich for my blood since I always have to work for my money.

It would be nice to have some actual premium items in the shop instead of just 4 per week. We often have over 100 items in the gamble box (why should you be able to pick what you buy), but 4 items in the store. It is the guiding profit theory behind this game that people will not buy what they want if they have time to buy it, so you can put a few “items of the day” or “items of the week” to continue to push the false urgency that you think is required to get your customers to buy PC. The monthly premiums that I have seen have appeared to be a good value and I bought them, but most regular PC items appear to be a bad deal that will only be bought by players who don’t understand that they will not produce more damage or players that have a very large amount of extra cash and would just buy anything despite it not increasing there power significantly. It would be hard to believe that you would get less purchases if there were more listings of set cost premiums that have clear long-term value. Even with the set cost items, they almost always say they do some bonus damage based on how many pieces of the set you own or have equipped, but the full set is sold over multiple weeks, so a player can not know what the proc rate is or what the bonus damage is for the whole set. The game rarely gives any indication in the description that a proc on one item does more damage or procs more often than another item. It is usually, “Chance for bonus damage; extra damage if…..” This is not good info to make a financial decision. I also noticed that as I increased attack, the procs got to be pretty much insignificant and are less than just the normal damage variation from the standard attack, except the mount proc. But we can’t even compare the mount procs from just the item description. My solution is to more clearly indicate what the items will do even if you need to make a separate web page or forum for this. I have been using user compiled data to make my decisions and this is alot to ask of the community. The other idea to increase PC purchases while also maintaining or increasing customer satisfaction (instead of the opposite like you do now) is to decide on a criteria for assigning a price for premiums such as how useful they are or how old they are or whatever you decide instead of just using 100pc or 20 pc and then putting some items for sale as “items of the day” or “items of the week”. The items you get from raids and actually playing the game are pretty good and that is something that helps keep this game popular. I enjoy logging in every day and seeing if there is something special or new going on. That was really cool how you gave away the scorpion premiums for free in the event and I like this type of solution the best, but I know it would not be good for PC sales and I’m not trying to suggest ideas that will hurt your profitability. I really believe you would have more sales this way. I saw in the chat how people would do anything to get Vork when he was listed and I got these ideas because it would seem like we could have that type of excitement every day or week instead of just every month.

You also get another familiar to make your zaboooooooo better, so it has lasting value if you can hit it. I don’t think I can get it unfortunately, but I may use pots on the last day because I want to power up that zaboo. I expect that another raid will drop some crazy boost for that helmet also.

Take a look at this. This should give you hope of a better value and better experience in DOTD.Japanese government does the right thing first
This game has been lucky since it is so small. Some state gaming laws are already being violated by the expeditions and chests, but those laws are not enforced often.
I feel sorry for you “whales” that aren’t satisfied by your purchase. I stayed out of the gambling knowing that it is addictive and that it is designed to maximize profit which means that it will only give out enough reward for a few people to advertise it as worthwhile. You whales will probably not see any changes for a long time. If any of you live in Hawaii and spent alot of money, you could be in a good position for a class action. This is about the only way stuff changes around here.

That’s interesting. I took the add in the home page to mean that you could only get Fontella this one week and only from the expedition. If she was direct sale before or may be again, then we can wait and maybe get her for 200 pc or something.

The 1 item slot for PCs is another insult to players and should be removed from the game. Also, take out the automatic prompt that tricks people into buying stamina and energy refills. Instead a prompt should suggest for players to buy it from the bazaar instead like they should anyway. I know this has ripped alot of people off and does not generate any goodwill for the game. At least it hasn’t tricked me yet, but it almost did. Players are so used to having to keep buying health refills that you are training them not to read the prompt and hoping that they accidentally click the energy/stamina refill that most players do not want. I have been doing the surveys and getting about 10 kreds a day and I use them all on this game. If I get ripped off, I will just quit and use my gaming time playing some of the 300 steam games that I haven’t gotten too yet that I picked up in $1 bundle sales…

Even though alot of the gear is not as good as the new raids, it still really cool that we got a chance to get it. I got the 3 generals that could be useful for invasion and getting Beardman will be good too. Thanks for giving us newer players a chance to do this raid and I hope we will see it and other old raids/old gear sales in the future.

A few times I hit a raid and the damage showed on the damage list, but did not show above the raid. Then when the loot comes, it says I didn’t participate and I don’t get any loot. Here is a personal raid that I killed. It took like 80 stamina for me to kill it and it said I did not participate and it isn’t going to give me the loot. I got a screenshot.
This is very frustrating.

Splitting the loot that way also greatly reduces the value of what you get since you always get way less of one color of a crafting ingredient. If you are supposed to get 200 of 2 ingredients split up between the two, you are pretty much going to get 60 of the one you need the most and all the others are useless anyway. Maybe you could add an item or recipe or enchant that allows color changes on certain crafting components.

I saw bugs like the stat point issue too. What is happening is that the game did not properly update your crafting ingredients so it allowed you to try to craft more that you could with the amount of materials you actually had. This kicks you when you attempt it. When you refreshed, everything got updated from the server and you actually have the correct amount of everything. Getting kicked and having to reload is inconvenient, but this is a good way to reduce problems from hackers editing things client side.

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